The Devil and the DNS

Yesterday. Sigh. Where shall I begin? True to type, I waited till the last minute to check into the verity of the DNS-Changer virus (2012's equivalent of the Y2K thingy). I'd had the fear tucked away, a faint glimmer at the back of my mind, waiting for its chance to wend its way into the actively working part of my brain. But it had a long line of more pressing thoughts in front of it, so it patiently waited, passive thing that it was. Now, I know what you're thinking: "You got hit by DNS, neener, neener, neen-er!" But you're wrong. I assumed I would, and the DNS is the devil if it's not working properly. By the time I came around to trusting that the DNS-ok site wasn't, itself, a scam, and went there ~ the site had already shut down. But it didn't matter, for if the DNS devil had struck, it'd be too late for me, and I'd just be fried. Time for a new PC anyhow.

Now, also true to type, my main brain was focused on bigger things. Me and my tunnel vision (my TV and I) were focused on site building. I typed on till midnight. I was hard at work building a blog, organizing its pages, linking my sub-domains, structuring the links, and, yes, writing the posts; for I am known as a multi-tasker. It won't do for me to go about a thing the simple way. Gotta be complicated. Now, with half-a-dozen open web pages, including Blogger's builder, several files, and Notepad (three unsaved bits of a post, well-written, I thought) ~ the last thing I needed was an old-fashioned power outage. But, there you go. Right in the middle of my intense concentration and type-o-rama (my fingers were flying) ~ CLAP! The screen went black. While I was page building, a storm had been building outside, and our nearby power line was the recipient of its wrath. (Dang the dang pine beetles, there's hardly a tree left standing on the mountain. The only thing holding them up is our power lines). I find it highly ironic that I was by-passed by the DNS devil, only to be humbled by an old-timey, Huckleberry Finn, wrath-of-God thunderstorm. So, I felt my way downstairs in the dark. One consolation: I found it rather gratifying, in a hot-chocolate-and-midnight-feast kind of way, to tuck myself up in a cotton blanket, point a flashlight at a paper page, and proceed to indulge in an old-fashioned, tea-and-crumpets, Miss Marple mystery. Some things never change.

The Year 2000 (Y2K)

It was New Year's Eve of the year 2000 and we were all set to experience the greatest freakout of computer bugs in the history of glitches. It was the Milennium Bug. And it was said that the Internet wouldn't survive it. In fact, they said, even our clocks might not survive it. Our microwaves. Our cars. Anything that was guided by computer might come crashing to the ground, at dawn of the year 2000. They said this to a world who had maxed out their credit cards for every new electronic gadget that had come down the pike that decade. And now, they told us, it will all be a dud. And this, because of a lady who never foresaw the day we would need four digits to show the year. Maybe she did foresee it, but in 196?, it must have seemed eons away. And RAM was scarce. Techies and non-techies alike were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, squawking like Chicken Little: The sky is falling, the sky is falling. We won't survive the year 2000. My nieces were spending the night with us, and we were talking about the prospect of life without our newfound toy. (They jostled for elbow room at the computer. They didn't have one yet.) We played computer games and we watched the crowd in Times Square. We listened to predictions. I had my niece poised at the door, ready to run outside at my signal and blow the car horn. (That's what we do out in the boondocks.) Then the countdown started. Ack! At the stroke of midnight, the crowd went wild. I stood at the TV counting down for the ball to drop in Times Square. Outside, my niece did her duty and the horn was blaring. Far off, down in the pasture, fireworks boomed into the air. Our neighbors were celebrating, too.

On TV, all night, all they'd been speculating on was the stroke of midnight, and would every computer fail? After all my work, and on top of the news of the demise of my ArtForum, I was disgusted, as you might well imagine. But... I still had a sense of humor about it. At that moment, I conceived of a great practical joke that I would play on my nieces. No, I'm not the PJ I once was. I've mellowed ~ I have a reputation to maintain. Dignity. Integrity. But I still get a wild hare every now and then. I am a night owl, and the night was young. And I was giddy with champagne. I drank a whole cup. On TV, people were singing and dancing: 'It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine! I feel fine!'

I felt fine! My computer was not smoking. But I was. I started hacking that keyboard. I was Stan with a plan. I was a Paintbrush whiz. I grabbed that Mouse and I painted that rectangle desktop green. Then I selected the color white, switched to text tool, and started typing gibberish. I chose Courier size 10 and I typed data. It didn't matter what data. I typed 000000s. I typed dates. I typed exes. I switched to Symbol and I typed Greek. I knew well what a trashed file looks like. I learned what a magnet does to a floppy disc back when floppies were 8 inches wide and, well ~ floppy. I covered that screen in Greek. In between the gibberish, I typed 2000, 1900, date does not compute. ERROR! ERROR! I typed all kinds of garbage. I switched to red, and changed the font size. I typed more garbage. Then I saved that file and made it into a Wallpaper. (Wallpaper was something I knew how to do. Early on, I'd had 6 months of a computer without Internet and with very little software loaded on it. I had time to learn how to do wallpaper.) Then I started on the folders.

By the year 2000, I had the knack of that drag-and-drop thing. I had Windows down pat. I created a single folder, and I named it dERRORf2000k. Then I dragged every folder on that desktop into that one folder. The one folder that couldn't be moved, I covered up. Shortcuts and Windows icons, I moved, covered with blank folders, or renamed to gibberish, having already learned that you can dump or rename shortcuts without affecting the file itself. I couldn't remove some of the Windows icons, but I could rename them. I renamed them gibberish. The one icon that wouldn't rename, I covered with the single folder I had created. That screen looked a mess! Those girls will freak when they see this screen, I thought. They will not know what to do. By then, I was dead tired, but happy, and I went to bed.

Come morning, I felt like dead meat. I am never much in the morning, and man, was I was sluggish that day! I was dying to see how the girls would react to to my little joke, but I didn't want to spill the beans, so I waited patiently. They never came up. I went downstairs and they were all involved in a movie. It was some long, drawn-out saga. It lasted for hours and hours. They never did come up. In the end, the joke was on me. My practical joke fell as flat as the Y2k Bug. I guess our great scare sounds pretty silly now. You just had to be there.

The Millenium Bug had scurried off to the cobwebs of tech history, and my site, Bugbones, was on the verge of a great new life. Said she.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

NOTE: This post was revised after I discovered I'd left out a segment. I've had to backtrack a little, in keeping with the timeline...
(Ref. chronology and y2k terms. I was there, but I just had to refresh my memory.


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Year_2000_problem&oldid=258180096)